Powering 3D Interoperability and continued collaboration through OpenUSD

Over the last few years, we’ve seen dramatic technological changes, undoubtedly revolutionizing the ways we work and create. Operating in a digital-first era means collaboration is crucial — it is our duty at Adobe to integrate tools and creative frameworks seamlessly and effectively. It has always been our goal to enhance the creator pipeline across creative industries by providing leading technology and developments across Adobe Creative Cloud.

But we also recognize that this is not something we can accomplish on our own, which is why we’re thrilled to announce that we’re working with Pixar, Apple, Autodesk, NVIDIA and the Joint Development Foundation (JDF) to create the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD). AOUSD’s overarching goal is to enhance collaboration across the 3D ecosystem to facilitate standardization of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD).

OpenUSD is an open-source technology that uniquely enables high performance interchange of highly complex 3D assets, data, and tools, and collaborative 3D workflows. Before joining the Adobe 3D&I team, during my tenure at Pixar where I oversaw the development of USD, I could clearly see its potential given how strongly it resonated with production teams. It became quickly obvious that USD technology could be useful to the entire 3D industry and should be open sourced.

The framework was designed to strengthen the interoperability of data and 3D tools, allowing developers to expand the scope of 3D-enabled products and services. Open standards for 3D content multiply the value added by each package and device. The benefits of OpenUSD are fourfold. Firstly, OpenUSD offers an extendable ecosystem with APIs for editing, creating, rendering, simulating and collaborating in 3D environments. Additionally, OpenUSD ensures non-destructive workflows, and the open-source software is file system agnostic. Lastly, OpenUSD reinforces custom renderers in a generalized pipeline.

OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology driving interoperability. It’s a critical player as artistic expression and content production continue to evolve. The Alliance aims to generate global collaboration for OpenUSD and to encourage companies to join and expand compatibility and integration.

Adobe has been supporting industry standards across its large family of creative applications for decades, with PDF being a notable one in the document/publishing space. With OpenUSD, we’re looking forward to fully leveraging this new powerful standard for 3D scenes and foster seamless interoperability between our Creative Cloud applications and other 3rd party solutions.